


A Memoir of the Flesh

by fluorescentgrey



Category: Old Kingdom - Garth Nix
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Memoirs, Multi, Pining, Post-Canon, Post-Possession, Relationship Negotiation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-16
Updated: 2018-12-16
Packaged: 2019-09-19 19:57:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17008206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey
Summary: At the Abhorsen's House after the Events, Nick tries coming to terms with his new reality, with mixed results.





	A Memoir of the Flesh

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hapakitsune](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hapakitsune/gifts).



> it must be noted that sam and lirael are canonically related. threesome energy in this story is a fantasy only and is all contained to the section beginning "in his preferred fantasies." please feel free to skip this piece if you need.

When he thought of that time, it was with care to make sure the cat wasn’t in the room. Although sometimes he would look up from writing and find that the cat was there, lying in a sunbeam in supreme repose, staring at him. He had never been overly fond of cats or dogs for that matter and to wit as a child in far South Ancelstierre had had a tortoise for a while until it died under suspicious means. And anyway, this thing wasn’t a cat, or so Lirael and Sam had explained. It just looked like a cat, because of its collar, so it was imperative never to remove the collar, and probably inadvisable even to touch the collar for any reason whatsoever. Why are you saddling me with this thing, Nick might’ve said if at the time he was not so confounded to be alive he might’ve allowed himself to be saddled with literally anything.

In the sitting room in the sprawling house on the island, having tracked in clods of dirt and dripping wet, Lirael and Sam turned to each other. In profile there was a suggestion of relation about their faces — the shape of the eyes, the slope of the nose. “We don't know,” said Sam. “The Free Magic.” 

They were saying this term a lot in his presence as though he knew what it meant and didn’t understand something about it applied to him. 

“I know,” Lirael said. She looked at Nick and then at the cat. The cat looked at her and then collapsed into a luxurious reclining position as though it was posing to be painted by one of the old masters. Lirael’s gaze travelled up to Nick again. This was still when he could barely stand up so the weight of it almost bowled him over. When she spoke it took him too long to realize she was speaking to Sam. “They can look after each other.” 

“Can they?” 

“They’d better.” 

Nick was dragged to the bathroom by the mirror-shadow entities Sam and Lirael called Charter sendings to sit on the slate-tiled floor of the shower hugging himself and be scrubbed aggressively. What was running into the drain was mostly blood. Unthinkable filth. The chill of that river had still not quite come off him. The sendings unfolded him and hauled him to his feet and soaped him everywhere with cold — maybe ‘hands’ was the wrong word. When satisfied (when his skin was all-over pink) they straitjacketed him into a fluffy white robe and sat him down at a long table where steaming-hot soup and tea were presented. While he was eating Sam and Lirael came back in from scouting the perimeter. They communicated between one another with eyes and Nick’s jealousy was like — well, like something sharp and hot hammering into the still-raw place in his chest where all-too-recently something similar had taken up a long residence. 

“Don’t touch anything,” Lirael said suddenly. 

Nick nearly choked on a too-hot wedge of potato. “What?” 

Sam leant back in the high-backed regal chair, crossing his arms with an air of reluctant resignation to his role as Abhorsen Translator. For the first time in as long as Nick had known him he had let his facial hair get to the point of road-dusty scruff. Somehow he didn’t look disheveled. “She means, we’re going to let you look after the house.” 

“ _Let_ me?” 

“Some would consider it… rather a privilege.” 

“I thought you almost died in the basement.” 

“We did,” said Lirael. Sam had not yet made her a prosthetic hand. Simply there hadn’t been time. On the road north from the Wall, she had kept the cauterized stump wrapped in a spelled bandage and hidden in the deep pockets of her traveling cloak. Now she rested it on the table and shooed away — like moths — the sendings who approached her to investigate. “Don’t go in the basement.” 

He had not gone in the basement, and avoided unfamiliar doors, which were many. Sometimes doors appeared where there had been no doors before; these especially he avoided. He checked, in case some elemental form of space had changed, each time he opened the door to the kitchen or his bedroom by hovering his hand around the knob trying to refine the new magic inside himself enough to sense what lay beyond. Success on this front was mixed. Occasionally he opened doors and couldn’t quite comprehend what was there, but when he closed those doors he forgot about it. 

Hearty soups were provided and the provenance of the hunks of unidentifiable meat in the bottom of the rustic clay bowls undiscussed with the mute sendings. Occasionally he walked the grounds like an invalid from a romantic novel. It was very green in the gardens but beyond the sound of the river he could sense something unnameable that stirred the fine hairs at the back of his neck. The sendings watched from surreptitious corners, enfolding themselves behind moss-encrusted marble columns and statuary. He sat in a sunbeam letting the light touch his face until it faded behind one of the narrow pines. 

By gaslight in the bathroom attached to his chambers he stood in front of the mirror in his underwear and tried to make observations with the calculating, clinical eye of a military doctor. He no longer had quite so many very obvious bones. The last of the deep dark bruises accentuating the shadowed hollows of his chest had turned greenish and started to fade. He still had no nail on his left index finger where the shard had forced its way through his skin at the last. That thing had treated his body like disposable gloves but it was gone now and so were the blood-bruises and the funny black marks, the fever, the fainting, the chapped throat, the dust coming out from inside him, all that. Except now there was the forehead thing. 

He leaned closer to the mirror and touched it with two fingers. It lit up and then the world slid off to the left into a bright darkness full of words. He knew this was the Charter, whose use still eluded him, though, before she left, Lirael had tried: 

“Think of yourself like the cat,” she’d said, on the settee in the living room, while Sam was taking a bath. She’d showered and her hair was slick black, tied back, smelling of irises, accentuating the sharp and refined bones of her face. She was elegant enough naturally to look like a debutante, though this effect was rather sullied by her missing hand, the surcoat quartered with keys, and across her chest the bandolier of dread bells. 

A whole panoply of reasons Nick couldn’t get his voice under him: “In what — what?” 

The cat in question was butting and winding around Nick's feet. “That cat is — or was, I guess — a seventh gate rester by the name of Mith,” Lirael said. “He wouldn’t stay there, so. Now he’s here. Touch him.” 

“Lirael, I — ”

“Just touch him, Nick.” 

When he did he got a feeling like a static shock. The cat’s eyes weren’t really like any normal color of cat’s eyes, or any eyes for that matter, or any color for that matter. Something twitched in the back of his mind, and then in the back of his throat. It was like a memory of a feeling so pure it is almost the feeling. He took his hand away. 

“Did you feel that?” asked Lirael. 

She was watching him wringing his hands, which he hadn’t quite realized he’d been doing. “Are you sure — I mean, it felt like — ” 

“I’m sure. He’s safe as long as he has the collar. His bell — it’s like a little one of my bells.” With her bare wrist she indicated the second-largest in the bandolier. “And the collar’s made of the same magic that the dog gave you. Charter magic. Are you following?” 

“I guess — ” 

“If the cat didn’t have the collar, and if you didn’t have your mark, you’d be the same. You’d be dead. Which, as you know, is not necessarily…” She searched for the appropriate descriptor, circling her living hand as if filtering through a dictionary. “… not necessarily a permanent condition. You’d have near-boundless quantities of ungovernable magic. You’d be — I think a Lich is what the pros call them. Hedge might have tried to enslave you, if he could control you. Which is rather a big _if_. Are you following now?” 

Most of what she had said was unthinkable so he focused on the part that had confused rather than terrified him. “What’s a Lich?” 

“A certain varietal of the Greater Dead.” 

“There are — ”

“ _Yes_. There are numerous varieties.” 

“Do you have books… enumerating the varieties, or — ”

“None that you can read. But are you following?” 

“Yes, yes, I guess so.” 

“That mark is what saved your life,” she said, looking at it. “And I guess also saved me from you becoming even more of a royal pain in my ass. That mark is what is keeping you… safe.” 

“You mean keeping other people safe. From me.” 

Nick could see Lirael considering lying and deciding against it. “Yes,” she said. 

“How safe?” 

She bit her lower lip tightly. “That’s why we’re leaving you here,” she said eventually. “I need to figure out how safe.” 

“How are you going to do that?” 

“I’m going to talk to history.” 

It wasn’t even worth probing further on the subject. He didn’t quite have the mental energy, and besides Lirael seemed confident she had explained everything in the most accessible possible terms. “Okay,” he said inanely. “Good luck.” 

She took him into the library and scanned the shelves before enlisting the help of a sending to identify and take down a very old book called _Charter Spells for Children._ “Children,” Nick said. It seemed, when it came to these matters, easiest and most sensical to communicate solely by echoing things others had said. 

Lirael ignored him. “Learn everything you can,” she told him. 

“But how?” 

For the first time since any of this had begun he thought he might cry. She studied him. She had grown up quite a bit in a short time and she understood it was not so simple as saying, I don’t know. “It came easily to me,” she said gently. “Don’t try it for a couple days. Don’t force it. Eat. And then maybe — you can do an easy one.” 

“Like what,” he said. His voice sounded very small. “What’s an easy one?” 

“ _Nuru_ is the sign for light,” Lirael explained. With her forefinger she drew a circle and put a line through it and took it — nothing, she took nothing — into her hand and then she opened her hand and there was a light in it. 

“How’d you do that.” 

“You can probably do it too now,” she said, eyeing his forehead, “after you get your strength back.” 

After their departure, Nick had decided he would practice for an hour a day. After three days of nothing happening and subsequent shortening of the allotted practice time down to zero, he pivoted to writing his memoirs. 

\--

Sam had made him all these little things. Some of them were quite silly and most of them might’ve been better suited to children. They had arrived by assorted confounding means from Belisaere, where Sam had been enlisted by his parents to assist in the establishment of refugee resettlement and protection programs, according to his letters, which were brief and full of tidings so glad they evoked Nick’s innate skepticism. They were little toys of gold and silver metal that worked by clockwork and gears Nick couldn’t understand. There was a mosquito catcher and an entirely unnecessary alarm clock and a strange many-legged creature that would lie over your feet and warm them. Nick found himself using the latter most every day while he wrote in the sitting room, which was rather cool given the entire wall of windows. 

Frankly, he worried that Sam hadn’t quite internalized the conversation they’d had all those years ago. Otherwise, perhaps recent events had suggested it might be kosher now for him to betray those promises. Dying in someone’s arms and then being the unwitting subject of a miraculous resurrection would do that, Nick figured. Based on what had been recounted of the proceedings, Nick wondered if Sam had had any time at all to reflect on his regrets in the moment. Likely it had come to him after, as they picked their way ruinedly across the scorched wasteland. 

There had been no point in going to an Ancelstierran hospital. Given that the source of all this horrific bodily trauma simply couldn’t exist in the consciousness of anyone born South of the wall, it was going to be prohibitively difficult to explain Nick and Lirael’s respective conditions to the relevant authorities. Lirael insisted that since her wound was cauterized there was not much to be done but move and nobody had the fortitude or energy to argue with her on the subject. Nick’s knees kept buckling under him until Sam produced some shapes made of light and touched him with them. The light patched him where there were empty spaces. They walked. There was never any conversation about if Nick should stay in Ancelstierre. 

“What’s that river,” Nick said. “I saw your dog…” 

From inside her filthy surcoat the elbow of Lirael’s hand-missing arm touched his. He heard her voice from beside him, worried, stern: “Sam.” 

He felt the arm around his shoulders again. The glowing runes producing from inside Sam’s cupped palm. Light — shadow — tricks, the way he did in school, Nick couldn’t help but think, for a second. 

He himself had thought their affair finished in school and had taken a methodical scientific approach to finding his kicks elsewhere and actualizing a stringent yet jovial just-friendship. There had been no other way to take the whole thing but in stride. The way it had gone was rather absurd, really: kissing was fine, touching was fine, all of it was fine, until Sam had said, I could use my mouth, and Nick had told him, for some bloody reason, uh, that’s really not necessary, but three months later he heard Sam had done that with Bryce Alderman and had laid in bed staring at the ceiling in lieu of sleep for three straight nights until he fainted in advanced chemistry. The first of the hostile takeovers by an interplanetary unit of jealousy. The conversation he had wanted to have was: you are a motherfucking prince and your blood is made of half death and as such you have the liberty to explore whatever queer (definitionally and colloquially) aspects of your personality you see fit whilst avoiding much direct bullying, but given that I have no such social insurance as the scion of perennially unpopular politicians, how can we make sure you can fuck me and no one finds out about it? The conversation they had instead was: maybe we should just nip this whole thing in the bud and never speak about it again. And to seal it they had shaken hands. 

A blowjob from a prince. Kicking himself over that one for years. Wasn’t that what people said it felt like to shoot heroin? 

At the checkpoint on the Wall steaming mugs of thin, watery coffee were supplied along with rock-hard shortbread cookies and minimal sympathy. Nick sat in the dirt, shivering under a wool blanket supplied by the Scouts, and watched the soldiers bustling around the great scar. The structure itself had been damaged in the offensive but still there was night on one side and day on the other. It was reassuring to be reminded after this holocaust of reality that certain strictures of being and existence were inviolable. 

\--

The conversation he thought he wanted to have with Sam now was: I can tell you’re not over it and perhaps neither am I. But would it offend you if I were to sleep with both you and your aunt? 

\--

None of this, of course, was going to make it into the memoir. Nick had never actually read a memoir, finding the genre innately trite and narcissistic, but he had read numerous biographies of great Ancelstierran barons of industry and preferred them void of sexual intrigue. In school some of the boys had somehow acquired assorted pornographic novels and magazines which had been circulated in the same manner of tobacco and cannabis pipes and though he enjoyed these pleasures of the flesh as much as any other he didn’t actually think he could write any of those words down. So much as writing _penis_ in biology had taken supreme effort. He chalked this up to his strict religious upbringing, which had upheld ‘the sanctity of traditional marriage,’ much like his father and uncle’s political platforms, and had strictly consigned sexual relations to such arrangements. 

He soon realized there was no way he was going to be able to write about what had happened with the same prosaic style he appreciated in a good biography. Quite simply he had accomplished nothing but almost ending the world, and most of the progress toward that end hadn’t even really been him. Besides, if he limited himself from from describing the abject fleshy reality there wouldn’t be much of a memoir at all. That gave him an idea for a subtitle, which he managed to fully write and stare at for about ten slowly, shockedly dawning seconds before scoring it out so aggressively he tore the paper: _A Memoir of the Flesh._

He folded the paper over tightly to hide the mar, steeled himself, and decided to approach writing in the style of a passage he had once read describing the mutinous initial forays of Ancelstierran explorers into the rot-seeping jungles (long since desertified by changing weather patterns) of the lands across the Southern sea: as a kind of painstaking narrative of colonial disaster. 

_When the shard reached my heart, as far as I can tell, it entered a period of seeming dormancy. Perhaps this had something to do with my remaining in Ancelstierre over a long summer of wind from the south. I remember having vivid dreams but not what happened in them. I would get up and go to the window and open it to breathe, not that it was any less stuffy outside. I cut chocolate from my diet for a while because of a presumed causation. The hemispheres did not enter the dreams until I crossed the Wall. Which I never, one year ago, would have referred to with a capital W; this would at the time have seemed to me to denote legitimacy to its superstition. I now uniquely understand this legitimacy to be warranted._

He crumpled this page, thinking it moved the action too quickly. Then he smoothed it out again and rewrote part of it in the notebook. 

_When the shard reached my heart, as far as I can tell, it entered a period of seeming dormancy. Perhaps this had something to do with my remaining in Ancelstierre over a long summer of wind from the south. I remember having vivid dreams but not what happened in them. I would get up and go to the window and open it to breathe, not that it was any less stuffy outside. I cut coffee and chocolate from my diet for a while because of a presumed causation. During this time I felt pleasantly galvanized to strike up correspondences with a number of fellows who had shared my interest in electricity in our school days. I went for brisk walks each morning before the worst of the heat settled and occasionally felt something twang in my chest very like a plucked lute string. This was easy enough to chalk up the humidity and to caffeine withdrawals owing to the lessening of my coffee and chocolate intake._

This seemed to move the action too slowly. He doubted any readers, hypothetical though they may be, were going to want to read about his negotiations with assorted scions of Ancelstierran power, especially given that nothing of this nature would ever be able to be published in Ancelstierre. 

Instead of crumpling the page, he turned it over and started anew on the verso, dripping thick blots of ink from the sharp quill nib against the thick ivory paper. Perhaps it was most prudent to start transcribing the strongest memories rather than the first. 

One in particular had been sticking with him. He had been sleeping in snatched hours, mostly in the day, like — recalling with a sharp, nauseating horror having stubbornly thought for so long of the reanimated corpses of murdered refugees as a cadre of workers who preferred cover of darkness and still water under which to labor in deleterious conditions — one of the Night Crew. Maybe it couldn't really be called sleeping. He went over the room with a fine-toothed comb to make sure the cat wasn't in it and nor were any of the sendings, not that any of that mattered, because the latter could (and did) come in through the keyhole with potent sedatives, and the former obeyed no laws known to Ancelstierran physics and was capable of seeming metastasis through the floor. He had a cup of tea and read Lirael’s Charter book, then he put the light out and lay in bed and stared at the ceiling. He put his hands over his chest and felt his heartbeat. All the soft stuff inside. Mentally, and sometimes with the tips of two fingers, incredibly lightly, almost not touching his skin at all, he traced the route the shard had taken into and out of his body — from the heart through the chest and the arm to the bloody hollow at the tip of his finger. A few times he had tried to masturbate to knock himself out, increasingly creatively, and always with disappointing returns, so he had abandoned the endeavor with a sense of boyish hopelessness, and had sealed his pillow around his ears. 

Unless the sendings came in and drugged him, which he had at first protested but didn't anymore, he lay in the bed staring at the ceiling. The bed was the most comfortable he had ever lain in — more comfortable than the guest bedroom at his uncle’s townhouse in Corvere, which to this point had seemed the very apex of decadence. At night the darkness was total, except for the moon. The river screamed a great chest-opening grief-roar where it collapsed from the high cliffs and shattered on the mossy stone at the base of the falls. Invariably Nick's mind slipped toward the memory of his sleeping chambers immediately previous. There too — in the squalid canvas tent perched on a precarious patch of dry ground, in which every flat surface was stacked with bowls of herbs and candlesticks flowing fragrant white wax to keep the smell down — there had been someone (something) he couldn’t keep out. 

Consideration of his helplessness in those days contributed to a sensation akin to that of insects crawling on the skin. The thing inside him had not exactly been helpless but it had been subject to near-human limitations. It was like an ember ancient people carried in a hollow horn across the plains, except the horn was himself. 

Hedge came in through the flap with the red light of that place and sat Nick up and took his pulse and looked in his eyes one at a time by the light of a stubby animal fat candle held in a tarnished tin chamberstick. “How are you feeling," he said, “master?” 

Nick had explained time and time again, toward the beginning, that these formalities were unnecessary. He didn't quite have the breath for it anymore. His head seemed to work at a slower clip. To think about it now perhaps it should have been obvious long before Lirael came that there was some kind of parasitic infection afoot. Relevant parts of him were being used by something else. He was never not hungry but even the plainest bread nauseated him. Everything his skin touched corroded. 

“Chest aches,” he told Hedge. Voice sounded wrong. 

Hedge set the chamberstick alongside the potpourri on the collapsing bedside table and lowered his ear to Nick’s chest. His hair was thin showing old burn scars at the scalp and the nape of the neck. It did not frighten him. Sometimes he found Hedge’s voice and his presence almost hypnotically calming. “Breathe," he said, "deep as you can.” 

Nick tried and managed two shaky inhales before he dissolved into hacking coughs. “It feels — ”

Hedge looked up. His eyes focused like a camera lens. 

“ — I don't know. Like something sharp inside me.” 

It took Hedge a moment to respond. He was waiting, it seemed, for something that never arrived. “You’ve been very ill, master,” he said finally. “I've had something made in Belisaere. The city's elite swear by it to relieve… congestion…” 

He produced a tin from somewhere inside his robes. It was made of almost the same burnished bronze as the set of bells he wore. Whatever was inside stank. Everything in this place smelled like sharp metals but this was worst of all. Nick lay down on the cot, still coughing. Hedge carefully removed his gloves and placed them beside the candle on the table. 

It was some kind of reflexive sense memory from his childhood or else the machinations of that thing in his nerve endings. Nick raised shaking hands and unbuttoned his shirt, not that there was much fabric left there to unbutton. His own chest in the wan light looked like the ribbed vaulting inside of one of the monumental and brutalist Southern churches he had been dragged into as a child by his zealous grandmother. He could see his own heart beating like a trapped butterfly. There was a bruise at the center of his chest whose provenance he could not remember and would understand only occasionally near the last. It was at this locus where Hedge began application of the thick white salve. His hands were so terribly cold that Nick flinched. 

“Be still now,” said Hedge. 

He didn’t particularly want to — couldn’t, because of the tickle in his chest — but somehow, he did. 

“You’ve been very ill,” Hedge said again. His voice had a kind of viscous warm weight. Like liquid steel. Up toward Nick’s collar the cold hand spanned his throat entire. It frightened him to imagine now and yet, then, in the tent, breath rattling in him like dice in a cup, he had felt comforted, quieted, soothed, like a colicky child, content to be helpless, to be cared for… 

“We’ll put you right, master,” Hedge was saying, almost to himself. “We’ll put you right…” 

He closed his eyes. The tickle in his chest grew and changed. He returned again and again to this moment of submission, or rather sublimation, in his dreams; perhaps it was most prudent to start here in the memoir. 

During his reverie the quill had emptied itself against the paper in a great black mar like a swath of something burned. He dipped its point again and began: 

_I could not forget now, though for too long I could not remember, the feeling of It seizing command of me. It had me — It was me. It had my mind inside Itself. It had every part of me, how It wanted, when It wanted. And It could use me — indiscriminately. It made It so I didn’t understand It was there. When It had me I didn’t know. It was me. It cleared — emptied my mind. It possessed me._

It happened quickly now — no need even to think the words before he wrote them. 

_i did not hear Its voice. Otherwise Its voice was only my voice. It used my mind most adeptly — so adeptly i thought the things It wanted were the things i wanted and suddenly i had the strength and the will to do them — any of them — all of them — and yet i couldn’t stand up very long, couldn't breathe — It ran Its kind of black fire through me and operated me like a bellows — It made me live whilst It killed me — It It It It It i dreamed Its Its Its dreams and i needed Its needs — i i i i was only like Its shell It filled me i needed It or else i was nothing and i needed what It needed or else i was nothing and i needed i needed i needed i need to be whole —_

A soft, cool light drew Nick’s eyes from the notebook. It was a golden clockwork mouse — one of Sam’s little toys. It had made its mysterious way onto the desk and was leaching the fine pale light-runes out of itself into the ambient space translucent and psychedelic as soap bubbles. The sight of it lassoed some dissociated division of Nick’s consciousness and forced it back into his body where he discovered his heart was skipping and slamming wildly against his chest as a loose screen door in a maelstrom and his vision was nearly red. He looked down at the page as one might look at a stab wound to one’s gut. Toward the end of the passage his handwriting was hardly recognizable as a production of human thought. It was shapes — lines — scratch — he floated. Left himself again. At the barest sensation of sound behind him he turned quicker than he later thought he should be able to. The door to the library had slammed shut and behind the thick wood paneling he heard the sendings desperately barricading it. 

Something twisted. He coughed. He felt hot all over, as at the peak of a fever. Vision — movement in the corners. Things. Beings, entities, varietals — lich, mordicant, stilken, shadow — and behind him that great sucking black drain which was nothing less than death itself. He couldn’t feel afraid. With the last of him that resisted the turn into the darkness he reached across the desk and grabbed the mouse toy. 

The second he touched it, it began to produce a cacophony of glowing marks. It was like being blasted with pure light from a high window. Otherwise some great wind which scoured every evil thing from the face of the earth. His breath was making ragged sobbing sounds which might’ve been embarrassing had there been actual people in the house. As soon as he could gather his wits about him again he ripped the scrawled-upon page from the book and burnt it to ash in one of the guttering gaslights. 

At last he went to the door and knocked on it but the sendings wouldn’t budge. “It’s only me,” he said at first, before he realized that was precisely the problem. He was midway through stages of immense grief that they would leave him in there until he starved before he had the brilliant idea to pass the Charter marks emanating from the mouse under the door, which was easy given it was still producing them with maniacal fervor. He could almost hold them but they wouldn’t quite stick, like dandelion fluff. He knelt on the floor and blew them through the draught under the threshold. The Nick of several months ago might have said it was only the activity that cleared his mind. 

When they let him out at last he saw the sendings had brought most of the furniture in the house into the hall in order to stack it against the library door. Their “body” language straddled the line between sheepish and tense and they watched him intently with the blank holes of their faces as he slunk away toward safer climes, as though it were possible now — as thought it had ever been possible — to leave any of it behind. It was as such that he gave up writing the memoirs. 

\--

In his preferred fantasies Lirael’s relative sexual inexperience (that she had been raised in an ice cave by scores of clairvoyant blonde women seemed indivorcable from herself, even in imagination) didn’t trump her willingness to dominate him in assorted creative ways. Sometimes this didn’t work or it did but he wanted more and so he thought of Sam, which was not really Sam but a version of Sam which would treat him roughly. This tended to work. Soberly, in the morning in the shower, he wondered if it was perhaps indicative of some particular pathology that he had just miraculously been saved from monstrous parasitic clutches and was now — before the worst of the bruises had even healed — joyfully fantasizing about forfeiting his body for others to use. The question was if he had always felt this way or if it was some kind of evil holdover from the experience, the way sometimes he still had those heady hovering dreams about the hemispheres. 

At the edge of sleep, he imagined he told Lirael, or Sam, that thing chased me out of me, and I don’t know what washed in, into the emptiness, or if anything did — if now, maybe, probably, I’m just a void inside… sometimes he imagined, guiltily, being embraced, being held, being touched very tenderly, both their voices having wound together saying the requisite cooing ‘no’s and ‘of course not’s, even as he understood they didn’t know, they spoke to one another out of earshot in hushed tones with concerned looks askance in his direction; other times he imagined, gleefully, being fucked savagely, which of course facilitated the greater fantasy that being fucked savagely might make one feel less empty, that the emptiness was only physical, that there was a cure that might be pleasurable. That there was any cure at all. Abstract meditation on his no-doubt-doomedness didn’t do much to quell the persistent urge, the persistent image to which he returned, in which he peeled off Lirael’s sweat-drenched leggings and knickers and ate her out under the surcoat, whilst she still wore the bells and the sword and the mail hauberk, her cold little hand at the back of his neck, whilst Sam took him roughly from behind, deep thrusts that abraded his knees against the fine wool carpet, whilst the waterfall screamed, whilst the sendings barricaded the door. 

Perhaps all this would be accepted by way of apology. 

\--

He woke from an evil dream and couldn’t breathe. For a moment he flailed helplessly until he realized the cat was sitting on his chest, purring. He may have screamed. He grabbed it around its soft little belly and practically threw it to the floor where it landed on its feet with impeccable grace and poise, staring at him with an unruffled disbelief in his petulance. “Fucking hell,” he told it. It yawned, pursing its astral demon eyes and opening its mouth into a great black void. Then it dissolved through the door. 

There would be no more sleeping. Nick got up and unearthed his dressing gown from the pile of his clothing on the floor — the sendings had at first occasionally dealt with it before seemingly giving up — and went down to the kitchen to put the kettle on for tea. It was just before dawn and the house was cold and quiet. In his nocturnal wanderings he had realized that the sendings didn’t so much sleep as sometimes they went away for a while. He imagined them all crammed together in a closet like a cave full of slumbering bats. Though he appreciated their help with just about everything, considering that which he could do on his own didn’t extend much further beyond making tea, it was restful to have time alone away from their vaguely pejorative “gaze” and obvious somehow-communication about his various frightful accidents and extreme patheticness. He could not shake his mother’s voice in his head — “well, I never!” — observing that servants in Ancelstierre would never think of behaving with such brazen brashness. 

Nick might’ve retired to the library with the cup of tea and indeed attempted but at the last he hesitated on the room’s threshold in memory of the last disastrous memoir-writing attempt. Instead he went to the front door, thinking he would sit in the garden and watch the sunrise, considering just about everybody was always going on about the restorative powers of fresh air and early rising. But when he finagled his way through all six locks and at last opened the door, there was a letter on the stoop. 

He crouched to read it. The cat had arrived from somewhere to circle his ankles and gaze longingly toward freedom and certain world cataclysm, so he held it back as he read: 

_Dear Nick I do hope this finds you well._

Sam was always writing letters like this such that the salutation “dear Nick” might also be read as an acknowledgment of Nick’s dearness to him. Nick had wondered if he wrote letters to anybody else this way. 

_I haven’t received any urgent missives of death and destruction so I take it whatever happened to activate the Charter mouse I made scared you more than anything. Please don’t take this as a breach of your privacy. Rather that I do feel really quite badly to have had to leave you after all that with all this funny new stuff to think about. Think of the mouse like one of those soap bubble machines for children. It produces marks when exposed to Free Magic. The marks are just happy ones — light, clean, calm, though maybe you know this already, if you have been reading the book. And anyway I have one too which is spelled to tell me when its match is activated. Really it’s quite jolly to know I did the magic correctly and I only hope you’re alright and not too rattled._

_Say, there is a public holiday next week and all the civil servants I’m working with on this refugee resettlement office have a long weekend. So I can likely get away with taking one too. Are you up for visitors? I do understand if not — but I eagerly await your reply._

_Your bosom friend,_

_Sam_

He wasn’t even trying to cushion the longing tone with casual schoolboy prose anymore, Nick noted. This was far worse than the rare letters of his Nick remembered receiving at the Red Lake, which were chock full of _Are you quite sure this is a reputable operation_ s and _I don’t mean to harangue you about something we relitigated nine billion times at school but_ s. So help him he could feel his heartbeat in his stomach. He stood, knees cracking, thwarted an escape attempt from the cat, shut the door. 

Responding necessitated daring to set foot in the library. The cat followed, a little voyeuristically, silent on its pinkish footpads. Nick tore a piece of paper out from his notebook — turning to the back, where the pages weren’t imprinted with the impressions of his desperate scrawl from the Incident — and took it back into the kitchen, where he wrote a quick reply: 

_Thanks for the mouse. Without it I maybe would have turned into a mile high column of boiling steam. All is well as can be since then. As for the visit you bet. I’ll be seeing you. NS_

\--

Sam’s arrival was prefigured by the sendings’ desperately making ready each and every room in the house for company, even the room where Nick had been sleeping, which weeks of fitful sleep and nightmare confusion had rendered a rather unholy mess. He ignored the cleaning preparations except to lift up his feet where they rested on the library’s parquet floor so the sendings could get a broom and a polishing rag underneath, sipping tea and trying to cram his way through _Charter Spells for Children_ as he had never before stooped to studying for an exam. It was ridiculous enough to be suddenly asked to understand magic was real, he thought, let alone two different kinds of magic with two different purposes, one of which necessitated consigning one’s soul to fiery undeadness and the other which… didn’t? 

He showered, didn’t shave, liking the rakish look, combed his hair and screwed it up again, cleaned his teeth, dressed. He looked at himself in the mirror. It had been a while since he had looked put-together. The effect was mildly sullied by the still-missing fingernail and the fact that his resting expression had become somewhat of a thousand-yard stare. He didn’t look much like a junior MP anymore and though he had spent much of his time at school trying to cultivate such a look — memorizing silverware order and trying esoteric tie-knots — he now found he couldn’t be bothered. 

Would it look desperate to sit and read in the gardens, he wondered. But of course it was then that the doorbell rang, ridiculously given it was Sam’s bloody family home by rights. 

The man himself was on the stairs outside worrying his traveling hat in his fists. Nick reached for his hand, holding the throttling mass of excited sendings back behind himself by sheer force of will. “Old friend.” They shook hands. Sam smiled his slow crooked smile. Angels were singing, etc. 

“You look well,” said Sam. “Well. You look.” 

“It’s the surcoat.” 

The sendings had given Nick a deep forest green one quartered with a gold representation of the Charter rune for _stone_. He knew this from the Charter magic book; evidently it was one of the first marks taught to most young children, which didn't make it any easier to learn. It was to be worn with a plain black shirt and trousers and a pair of velvety house shoes in which he could walk near-silently. The dark colors made his eyes look a very pale blue. 

“You don’t look quite so skeletal, really.” 

“Thanks.” 

They went inside. The sendings bustled around Sam in the door while he took off his boots, as though competing for his affections. He also looked well. Since the Events his confidence had grown into the build he’d inherited from his father; his shoulders were broad and straight, his waist was narrow. Nick swallowed. 

The sendings escorted them to the library, where they had put out a silver tea set Nick had never seen before — evidently the fine dishware was not to be wasted on a houseguest of his ill repute — which was piping with a fragrant floral blend he’d likewise never smelled before, entirely unlike the bitter, earthy smell of Ancelstierrian tea. Beside the tea things they’d artfully laid out a selection of fancy biscuits. It might’ve smacked of afternoons in the parlor at Nick’s uncle’s place in Corvere or otherwise like teatime during the reading days before final exams at school, huddled in the corner of the common room amidst stacks of dusty tomes, were it not for the fact that it had been assembled by these shadow-stuff beings who now waited excitedly for Sam’s approval and next instructions as they had never quite heeded Nick’s. 

He was going to say something silly about this, Nick understood as Sam dismissed the sendings. Indeed: “Don’t take it personally,” he said, “it’s the blood, you know.” 

“It’s the what.” 

“It’s the — nevermind.” 

“No,” said Nick, “I insist.” 

“I have Abhorsen blood,” Sam said, a note of embarrassment and another note of pedanticism souring his voice, “and royal blood, and wallmaker blood, as I've learned recently…” 

“And they can… smell it?” 

“Well, they can sense it or something, somehow.” 

It took real physical effort to drag his eyebrow back down where it belonged. Now that all this was real, one full former debate topic guaranteed to secure hours of lively discussion had been struck from the docket. Quite simply he was supposed to believe all the things Sam said — that these shadow-things, which had no features nor faces to speak of, which didn’t breathe or eat or drink or shit, could smell one’s ancestry — and stranger still. There would be no more seizing the conversation with a well-placed _97% of scientists agree_. That perfect pivot of which he had once been unquestionable master had gone to the dogs in that single moment of stupid bravery on the Perimeter, when he’d decided to take matters into his own hands and follow Sam’s hallucinatory babble to his own near-oblivion. _Bloody hell_ , he thought, panic rising suddenly. _What are we supposed to talk about now?_

“I’ve found them quite… capable,” Nick said for some reason, immediately kicking himself for resorting to the forced Tact and Etiquette he had heretofore reserved for stuffy acquaintances of his politician relatives. He reached for the teapot and poured Sam’s cup with enough room for cream and his own near full, seeing in his periphery that Sam’s eyes caught his missing fingernail. “Actually they’re a little pushy. And they can’t stand a mess and they’ll come right through the bloody walls.” 

“They have no real concept of privacy,” Sam said. He was watching one who had inserted some of the stuff of itself between the threshold and the closed door. It was strange to talk about them in front of them, though Nick’s mother (and many other ladies of her set) had never had a problem talking about real live human servants in front of them. 

“Could you make them with one? Like, could you make ones that knocked?” 

“Maybe. I don’t know.” 

“Would you try it?” 

“I don’t know if they would like it.” 

“God. Would they kill it?” 

“I don’t know if they… can be killed.” 

Nick shivered. 

“I mean,” Sam went on, clearly curious now, “they’re not alive…” 

“But they must have consciousness. You can tell when they’re upset.” 

So this was what had replaced their previous debate — conversation on the nature of consciousness as expressed by living shadows made dimensional by hundreds of years of piled-up magic. 

“We might establish that consciousness is not necessarily dependent on life,” Sam said. “Which certainly now you know.” 

“But the dead can be… I don’t know what you call it. Banished.” 

Sam nodded. “You can send them past the ninth gate.” 

“What’s past there?” 

“I don’t know. I haven’t been.” 

Lirael has, Nick thought, rather proudly, didn’t say. 

“But they aren’t dead, sendings,” Sam went on. 

“You’ve just said they’re not alive.” 

“Evidently,” said Sam, in the patented aloof and thoughtful tones with which he had once dropped then-unthinkable reflections in school, “there’s a third.” 

“No,” Nick declared. “There’s not a fucking third. More like, the state that constitutes life and the state that constitutes death are more multivalent than dreamt of in… Ancelstierran philosophy.”

Sam let this settle for a moment. “It’s nice to agree, isn’t it,” he said. 

“Don’t be smug.” 

“I’m not — ”

“I would be. I was prepared to be.” 

Sam watched him. He watched Sam. Neither of them had touched their tea. “It doesn’t really feel like winning an argument,” Sam said finally. “Considering.” 

“Considering what.” 

“I held you while you died,” Sam reminded him plainly. “Now, you know. Tea and biscuits.” 

The biscuits were stale, anyway, Nick nearly pointed out. The sendings weren’t exactly cracking cooks, nor was there a grocery store around or any of those civilized trappings, not that they could have left the house. “I came back,” Nick said. “And, you know, while I was gone, you were busy.” 

“That’s one way to look at it,” said Sam, dunking one of the biscuits in his tea to soften it. 

“Seems like it was quite exciting.” 

“Exciting, yes. Made a sword out of blood. Face to — well not so much face — with the most monumental evil imaginable just — ” He mimed the action with a fey delicacy entirely unlike the confident mastery with which Lirael held the instruments — “ringing a little bell.” 

“So you probably didn't have much time to think about — ”

“I did,” said Sam.

Probably wisely he left it there. Nick circled back to something that stood out even amidst the general absurdity. “You made a sword out of blood.” 

“Well — pretty much.” 

“How? Where is it? Can I see it?” 

“It went wherever Lirael’s hand went. It, like, melted it. I hardly even remember what it looked like.” 

“Well, the human brain retains funny details from moments of trauma…” 

Sam just looked at him like, _you think?_

“But speaking of the whole ordeal,” Nick went on, “you don’t have to spy on me. I’m perfectly alright now.” 

He was lying through his teeth and worried it was obvious but clearly it wasn’t, judging by Sam’s flustered reaction. “It wasn’t — I just wanted to — just in case.” 

“Just in case what?” 

“Well I figured it might be challenging for you to get a handle on all this.” It was such a laughable understatement that Nick was forced to assert control over his eyebrows again. “I can’t imagine what you must be feeling,” Sam said, uncannily capturing the precise tender tone of one of the school counselors who would gently reach for your hand at the precise moment before tears. 

“It was rather frightening when it happened but — ”

“What exactly happened?” 

“I started writing what it felt like. To go under.”

“Is that how you think of it?” 

“That’s — I mean, I guess, the least… disgusting metaphor.” 

“There are disgusting metaphors?” Nick just looked at him and watched him understand. “Don’t answer that,” Sam said at last. 

“I was writing how it felt and then I couldn’t stop. I didn’t mean to do anything. I don’t even know what I did. I looked — it wasn’t even text that I was writing. Just, like, signs, shapes. My vision turned red, you know, which is how I — which is what happened before.” 

“But you couldn’t stop writing?” 

“It was like I got into something underneath my real memory that remembered what it was like when It — because I don’t — I really don’t think about it. I’m not trying to remember it.” 

“Then why’d you try to write it?”

“Um, for posterity?” 

Sam exhaled through his nose in — Nick realized with a jolt — mild consternation and skepticism echoing Nick’s own whenever Sam would talk about magic and the dead not so long ago. “There’s always going to be Free Magic in you,” Sam explained. “It’s like radiation.” 

“Radiation!” 

“You were Its, um, host, for eighteen months. Think about it, like, that whole time, It put off some energy that’s still in you even if It’s gone.” 

“But — ”

“It makes sense the places that most touched It are most irradiated,” Sam said. He seemed to be extending the metaphor inside his own mind as he spoke. “Your subconscious. Those sub-memories. Maybe you just want to stay away from them.” 

“What if I can’t.” 

“Then you need to learn to control the Free Magic.” 

“How.” 

“With the Charter,” Sam said, like this was abundantly obvious. 

“Easier said than done.” 

“Nick, maybe if you tried a little harder — ”

“I am trying,” Nick lied. He could hear, embarrassingly, the volume of his voice increasing the more frustrated he felt. “Why do you even care.” 

He was surprised he’d said it. So was Sam. “You’re my best friend.” 

“I almost destroyed… life. As we know it.” 

“It wasn’t you,” said Sam. “You’re my best friend.” 

“Cut it out,” Nick told him, tired of this far quicker than he'd gotten tired of it at school. “I can read between the lines.” 

“What lines?” 

“Your letter.” 

“What about it?” 

“Was rather — weighted. Who says _bosom friend_?” 

“I do!” 

“Do you say it to everyone?” 

“You’re my only bosom friend!” 

“Well do you still — ”

“No!” 

“You didn’t even hear what I was going to say.” 

“I don’t still — or rather I worked it out. It shouldn’t trouble you.” 

“It doesn’t trouble me. It didn’t ever trouble me,” Nick said. “I think maybe we should go to bed.” 

Sam ducked his head to hide how quickly he flushed. As though it could be hidden, because it was mostly in the tips of his ears, and he had recently had his hair cut. 

“Maybe a little untoward to come out and say it,” Nick went on. “But I likely don’t share your… I’m-sure-intimate understanding of the social rules that govern such a thing in the Old Kingdom.” 

“We don’t necessarily have a golden record of sexual permissiveness,” Sam said, lifting his head. His eyes seemed bigger and wouldn’t quite tear away from Nick’s face. “Highly coded flirtation and sneaking around is the omnipresent way.” 

That was how they had done it at school… having snuck some strong local spirits into the Midwinter Ball and having drunk substantially less than they pretended to, “oh my god," buzzing, “I’m so fucked up,” remarkably unslurred, knowing it was probably not convincing, wandering off under pretense of a smuggled cigarette only to shove their hands down each other’s trousers and breathe into each other’s mouths against the cold brick wall; it was raining… 

“It broke something about me,” Nick told Sam, watching his face detune a little with a twitch of sympathy, “and I just want to see.” 

“What do you want to see?” 

“You never fucked me.” 

“You didn’t want to.” 

“Well maybe I would’ve if you’d asked.” 

“I did ask about the other thing and you said — ”

“ — but that’s the other thing, Sam.” 

The waterfall roared. 

“What do you want to see,” Sam tried again. 

_If it feels the same. Because I know I’ll like it if it feels the same._

\--

They went to bed. It was dusk. The river was loud and the house creaked, just old-house settling creaks, because the sendings’ footfalls had no sound. The last time he had done any of this had been with Tim Wallach after too many gin and tonics in his bedsit in Bain and it hadn’t been good, on account of all the gin and tonics, and they had made a sort of gentleman’s agreement to give up in the middle and never speak of any of it again. It seemed the primary way people functioned in Ancelstierre, Nick thought, promising himself that after this thought he wouldn’t be doing any more abstract thinking, was giving up in the middle and never speaking of any of it again. Here that way of living could get you killed. If you wanted something finished you had to bury it under seven layers of gold, silver, lead, oak, rowan, ash, and bone, and even then it wasn’t a sure thing. If even — especially — death wouldn’t do it, there was no point in pretending. Sam, having been born and raised in this place, certainly understood this better than Nick did and as such perhaps he had never been pretending. As such perhaps he had known as well as he knew that corpses should always be cremated that they would become lovers again someday. Perhaps he had held this as constant in moments of strife and trial, Nick thought — weakly promising that _this_ would be the last of the abstract thinking — except at the peak of strife and trial (to date) Nick had been fucking dead. 

All of the _only are you really sure you want to_ had already been decided. Left to negotiate was only the comparatively straightforward _are you really sure you want to like this_ , though they were both too deep in it then to really make an argument out of it; Nick felt like he was wading toward ecstasy through some kind of viscous gold liquid, which was mostly some kind of blindsiding need-beyond-desire, but which was also the caramelish glow of Sam’s Charter light sparking above them like a little star, an eye… 

It did not escape him that the last thing he had wanted so badly was to join the hemispheres. It was a kind of wholeness he longed for again, consummation, sublimation; as such, later he recalled with deep humiliation that tears sprung to his eyes when Sam entered him, and certainly he acted a bit of a whore; they grappled against each other in the big bed, and wrung each other raw; _free_ , he couldn’t help but think, in the end, cheek and forehead and open mouth wet against the bare mattress (sheets having been pulled back, tangled in twisting limbs), Sam holding his wrists together behind his back in a grip he could probably break but didn’t want to, delicious pain which compounded and reshaped itself and grew, _free, I’m free —_

Incarnadine light and color-sound burst sobbing forth from him. 

\--

He surveyed the pit. The earth-lake-sky gradient shades of serrated red as blood filling a wound. Something was yearning out of his inside toward the great scar and he swayed on his feet and clutched his chest. Occasionally he found he could stand straight out of the heaving coughs that doubled him. The workers never responded to his fits but he supposed that wasn't what they were getting paid (?) to do. They had been brought to this place to dig as he had been brought to this place to dig and he understood they must feel some kind of echo of his own compulsion and unlike his their bodies bore no limitation but for the sun. Amongst the chaos of shattering lightning he could ever hear their breathing (?) as the panting of some great belabored animal. When he was taken with certain moods he found he could watch them dig for hours even if otherwise he couldn't stand up longer than five minutes. He felt a contempt that was also an affection or a kinship for them especially as they would lose or shed pieces of themselves in the digging and yet continue digging. They would dig until their entire bodies disintegrated. He thought if his own body had not proved so traitorous now he might join them. Sometimes in dreams he scraped at the rock with bare hands until the flesh wore down to bone. He woke satisfied. 

This — the pit — the scar. Swaying. This — many times this. This great polluted red nothingness — this. Lightning filled the world with shocked color. Sometimes he remembered that was what he was here for. 

Occasionally he thought the gleeful golden sensation of power roused something in him that had been muted by the sickness. He found himself smiling, stretching bloody cracks into his dry lips. He understood when it was all completed — when he was home again, when the hemispheres were joined — that he would change. In a dream he turned inside out and observed the world from above. He surveyed the pit. The sight — the skin of metal in the crimson mud — sent a kind of creeping liquid through all his blood and lymph which got into his eyes and kept them open without blinking even in the thick smoke rising from all the burning corpses. 

\--

Sam’s Charter light blinked out, and they dozed. The snatched moments of dreamless rest were nice but it did not take long upon fully regaining consciousness for embarrassment to set in. Unfortunately Nick recalled this from school and all his subsequent sexual experiences, or, for that matter, experiences of barest vulnerability whatsoever. He had drifted halfway across the bed into a somewhat less humid region with a pristine view of Sam’s eyes and brow twitching with dreams. He busied himself for a while trying not to think about anything said or done in the proceedings, and yet when his bedmate awoke he found himself pulled reluctantly into tepid arms. Sam stroked his hair at the nape of his neck whilst Nick waited for the cat to dissolve through the door to create a reason to get up. Thinking, was there some sneaky magic way to do it that Sam wouldn’t feel — _here, kitty kitty…_

“Your skin is burning,” Sam said. His voice was hoarse and soft with sleep and Nick felt it echo in his chest. 

“Hmm. Yours is cold.”

“Mine is normal. Yours is hot.”

He was a fine enough lover for being, well, Sam; he had always been, if Nick was being honest, and clearly he had got practice in the interim, which now in the post-moment cold felt like an itchy old bandage. 

“You don’t have a fever,” Sam went on. “It’s all the Free Magic.” 

“You keep saying that like I know what it means.” 

“The opposite of the stuff you see when you touch your Charter mark, on your forehead.” 

“It has an opposite?”

Sam folded one arm behind his head. It was nigh incomprehensible that the scent of his sweat had recently seemed like manna from heaven. “Everything has an opposite,” he said. 

Nick sat up. He could feel Sam looking at his body. This too had been electrifying all too recently. All the sheets and blankets were on the floor; he could practically visualize the disappointed postures of the sendings, who were no doubt accustomed to the havoc wreaked by impassioned sexual exploits. 

“Was it everything you hoped and feared,” Sam asked him, trying to be aloof and casual about it. 

“Was what.” 

“Sex with me.” 

“We’ve had sex before.” 

Sam ignored that in favor of answering his own question, which had been his favorite debate maneuver even in Advanced World History at school. “I would say luckily few of my fears came to fruition.” 

“You had fears?” 

“Yeah, I mean, typical fears, like I would last five seconds, and also that you would snap somehow and throw us both all the way into Death.” 

“I don't have — you need a bell for that, the big one, right?” 

Sam smiled at him with a bare affection like raw honey. It scraped a single cold finger up Nick’s spine. “Yeah,” Sam said, “Astarael. See, you’re getting there.” 

Nick channelled all the Junior MP mirror rehearsal into a winning rendition of his fakest smile. Sam reached for his closest thigh and stroked the pulse inside it. The beatific expression had not quite melted from his face. “I missed touching you,” he said. 

“Just touching me?” 

“Well of course — yeah. You're very touchable. It was hard.” 

Nick had a sudden, terrible, embarrassing thought that under any other circumstance he might have successfully quashed. Junior MP Nicholas J.A. Sayre would certainly have quashed it. “What does it feel like to touch me now that I’m — ”

He stopped because he didn’t quite know what and looked to Sam desperately. But Sam didn’t know either. “Just — like you,” he said, if not unwistfully. “You’re older now, we're both older now, you know, you have chest hairs,” (this was generous of him) “and you’re missing a fingernail…” 

“Except hot.” 

“Right, yes. But — ” The corner of his mouth crinkled pre-laughter — “you’ve always been — ”

“Oh my god, Sam, shut up.”

“What!” 

“This is, you know, I’m serious.” 

“Well, in all seriousness, you’re just you, except warmer, and, and sometimes I could almost feel — or you have a little metal smell, behind your ear…” 

His first thought was, when was Sam’s nose behind my ear? Then he remembered in full technicolor detail (on his belly in the tangled blankets with ass in the air and legs whorishly akimbo he didn’t hesitate to tell Sam in garbled non-words how every inch of him felt as Sam’s mouth at his ear breathed him in and cooed intoxicating praise) and blanched at the memory of such gleeful and willing abandon. 

“Metal,” he said. 

“It’s a Free Magic thing,” said Sam, who had noticed the blanching, it was in the precise furrow of his brow. 

“You keep saying that,” Nick reminded him again, “like I know what it means.” 

“And I keep telling you what it fucking means, Nick!” 

Here was an excuse to get up even better than the cat — petulant rage. The problem was he wasn't sure where his clothes were. When he stood a sensation whose intensity might not entirely be encapsulated under the word ‘twinge’ radiated from the base of his spine. “Nick,” Sam said, “come on.” 

“How.” 

Sam sat up, piling the remaining bedcovers in his lap. There was a love bite inside his collar. “I mean — did you read the book?” 

“Skimmed it…” 

“You might,” Sam said, treading lightly now, “want to take it seriously…” 

“You think I don’t take it bloody seriously!” 

The surcoat and the pants were nowhere to be found but miraculously Nick managed to unearth his dressing gown, which he’d abandoned on the floor after his earlier shower. He tied it with a mind for extreme modesty out of pure spite only to watch Sam’s eyes flutter longingly in the direction of his belted waist. The accusation that he did not take seriously the lingering effects of his own literal death had his blood up, as did the feeling of Sam’s come running down his leg, just inside his thigh. He recalled he had forcibly ceased proceedings when Sam had offered to put his fucking mouth there. This was just how it was — when someone (something) had you like this, when they were (when It was) all the way inside you, there was always proof; there was always residue. The difference was Sam loved him. 

“I think… maybe you haven't fully considered the reality of the situation.” 

“Sam, I was fucking dead.” 

“I — yes, I intimately know, considering you died in my fucking arms!” 

He was literally going to pull this out whenever possible until they were old men, Nick understood. 

Sam fixed him with eyes very like his mother's — in which there was some unshakable, unkillable covenant. “It’s in you now,” he said. “It won’t leave you ever. It’s real. You — quite simply you have to believe me.” 

“Or what?” 

“We aren’t sure.” 

“We!”

“Me and Lirael.” 

Nick’s heart jumped sideways at the sound of her name. “So you two haven’t decided what to do with me yet.” 

“It’s not really deciding,” Sam said evenhandedly, “there are many factors.” 

“This isn’t a fucking math problem. Are you going to leave me here in the house forever?” 

“Uh,” Sam tried. He hesitated for just a little bit too long. “That probably won’t be necessary — ”

Nick crossed the room in about two steps and went out into the hallway, slamming the door behind him. He was on the stairs before he heard Sam following at a run, still wrestling his surcoat over his head. “Sorry,” Sam was saying, “sorry, sorry, I only mean, whatever happens kind of depends on you — ”

On the landing Nick turned on his heel and Sam stopped in his tracks. His hair was a filthy mess and he hadn’t put an undershirt on so Nick’s bite mark still showed at the join of his neck and collar. His lips — his mouth just a little open, eyes very soft. The face he put on when he was sorry but didn’t want to say it aloud. Nick’s heart did something stupid again. “Depends on me,” he said acidly, swallowing it. 

“If you want to become a Free Magic sorcerer I can’t stop you.” 

“I can’t even do anything.” 

“Well, I mean, you can. You did. It’ll keep happening. You already know the condition by which you can access it.” 

“But — ” He touched his forehead. For a second the weightless vertigo of the Charter subsumed him and then it went away again. 

“It's a choice,” Sam said, “we all have a choice.” 

“Whatever happened to all that, _does the walker choose the path_ …” 

“Um, obviously it’s up to the reader but I think the point is that the walker does indeed choose the path — ” 

Sometimes he remembered falling into the road on the Fateful Night. He had recalled it quite clearly before dying. There was no moon and the rain smeared the twisted trees and shadow. The woods moved and spat the man out. Even then he had been like some unfortunate bride. _Give me your hand_ … 

He had gone down there into the heart of darkness with the usual intent: to prove Sam wrong. To discover someone manipulating the clockwork controls or slide projector that upheld Sam’s impossible vision of the world. So of course he had chosen the path — he had just been confident it would lead somewhere else, i.e. to his own vindication. 

Perhaps this whole thing was karmic retribution. He turned heel again and took the rest of the stairs by two. 

Sam followed, still babbling: “Nick, I’m not saying — I don’t actually think that you chose, um, what happened, but — ” 

He quit there, perhaps wisely. The sendings vacated every room and stretch of hallway as they stepped into it, as though they were startled by the loud footsteps and the slamming doors. Sam followed him all the way into the kitchen, clearly hoping Nick would let it rest. He let Sam think he’d gotten away with it until the kettle was already on. Then he said, “But what.” 

The expression on Sam’s face screamed, don’t make me tell you. 

“But what!” 

“It’s just — ” He sighed. “I can’t help but think, what would’ve happened if — ” 

Sam stopped midsentence to scrub his hands over his face with seeming anguish. “Get the fuck on with it, Sameth,” Nick said. 

“If you’d believed me.” 

It had been quite simply unthinkable to imagine believing when they were at school together, and he had been far from alone in his certainty. When they were very young the headmaster had to have Sam aside after class and tell him, _now I don’t know much about this Old Kingdom, but_ … One of their English professors was from the North and claimed to have witnessed some Event around twenty years previous and he alone addressed Sam with any special formalities, but by the time they were advanced enough for such a class Sam already knew well enough not to speak about any of it outside a select circle of friends — not that that select circle was much more understanding. Nick sputtered a protest to Sam’s accusation, but some kind of floodgate had already opened: 

“You flat out refused to believe anything I said about… anything, for years,” Sam went on. “Some would say the tone of some of your jabs bordered on prejudice or mockery. Like the line about _primitive animistic religious practices_ …” 

“But you must realize it sounds ridiculous — magic — and the dead — fucking bells — ” 

“You basically thought I was lying to you for six years. Or — maybe worse — that even after the most advanced math and science education on the continent, that I couldn’t see beyond my adherence to superstition. Don’t you think if it was a joke I would have dropped it?” 

“I didn’t think it was a joke. I thought you were very serious.” 

“You thought I was very serious about — you chalked about 90% of the magic I did up to swamp gas!” 

“There was a marsh right out back of the dorm!” 

“We were indoors, you idiot! You basically refused to believe what you were seeing with your own eyes. Because it would take flipping something about the world, the way you understood the world. We always used to say it was the Toriest thing about you.” 

Sam knew how much Nick hated when his politics were assumed. He seethed. He felt like he thought the kettle might. 

“So I wonder, if you had believed me, and if you had trusted me when I said, in the place where I’m from evil magic exists but death doesn’t, at least not death how you’re used to, would you have gone after a bloody necromancer? And would you have let him… seduce you over the wall with this funny little lightning thing — ”

“Stop.” 

“You know I meant it figuratively!” Sam exclaimed. Then his face illuminated a shocking series of expressions, like a comic book flipped through quickly. “Unless — ”

“I didn’t.” Nick tried. Couldn’t articulate the rest. “How dare you.” 

“Listen — ”

“Perks,” Nick said. “The perks. I almost broke Hedge’s ankle with my hand while It was — you know. So imagine what I — what It might’ve done.” 

Sound dropped out of the kettle, prefiguring its finished howl. Nick turned the gas off and went to find the mugs and tea leaves with maximal slamming of cabinets. 

“How do you remember that," said Sam. He was trying painfully hard to keep concern from his tone. 

“What?” 

“That — you remembered something from — ”

“Do I look like I fucking know?” 

He found the fragrant floral tea the sendings had used the afternoon previous and noticed his hand was shaking on the spoon. Sam hovered in his vicinity, repelled by elbows, evidently distrusting Nick’s ability to handle even boiling water. Actionable fury was a pretty new feeling, Nick realized undelightedly. 

Somehow he managed to get the tea prepared, and then there was a lot of garbled back-and-forth about who would carry the tray, so eventually Nick put his hands up and backed off and let Sam get it. He led the way to the library, where a few sendings had busied themselves dusting already-spotless surfaces and checking the meticulous alphabetical order of the hundreds of books stacked high up the walls. Nick was accustomed enough to the mechanics of their consciousness that he could calculate the voyeuristic eavesdropping attention evident in their posture. What even was the point? He imagined their memory beyond time consisting of unceasing and ever-evolving Abhorsen family nonsense. Did they think about it? Did they talk about it? 

Wisely, Sam put the tea tray down before he probed further. “When did you remember that,” he asked. 

“When did — what?” 

“That you almost broke Hedge’s ankle. How long have you remembered that?” 

“I don’t know, Sam, I don’t remember when it happened — four, five months ago?” 

“I mean, I thought you didn’t remember anything from when… you fainted. So I’m just curious.” 

Now that he was thinking about it he didn't think he’d recalled that until just now. It seemed perfectly apparent, and almost filmic. His own hand with the broken nails and blood marks somehow exerting the force of an industrial vise. Pain twisted Hedge’s broad, ravaged face — a face that had for centuries endeavored to forget the expression of pain. A spark of vengeful delight rushed through Nick from the point of electric contact. “I don’t know,” he told Sam. “I guess sometimes I can remember — why? Why are you curious?” 

Like Lirael had, months ago, he could see Sam decide there was no point in lying. “I only wonder what else is there,” he said. “With the memories.” 

“Right,” Nick recalled, gesturing dismissively, “the irradiated subconscious.” 

“Nick — ” 

“For god’s sake I am taking it seriously!” 

“That wasn't what I was going to — ”

“It’s just, Sam, you really can’t understand how this all might be some truly improbable shit?” 

Sam’s eyebrow cocked, and he selected a teacup. Something in Nick hated that he chose the chipped one. “Isn’t it quite scientific,” he said lightly. “Quite neurologically sound. That probing one’s blocked memories from a traumatic event might cause some kind of psychological happening. Especially if those blocked memories are of something that might not be precisely reconcilable with one’s understanding of the world. If they’re unreal, incomprehensible…” 

So Sam chalked all of it — tip to tail, the sunken road, Hedge, the shard, the Red Lake, the wall, the Lightning Farm, death — up to Nick’s insisting on objective scientific reality. “Why do you think of me so lowly?”

“I think really quite highly of you, Nick,” Sam said quietly. “I always thought it was almost that you couldn’t believe. It would take changing everything about you.” 

“Well now that I bloody do and now that it bloody has I wish I didn’t.” 

“I thought you might — yeah. I’m sorry.” 

It was such an utterly half-assed after-the-fact non-apology that Nick went for the lowest blow he thought of only in the worst fits of insomnia, in the deepest, the darkest: “It was supposed to be you.” 

Sam didn’t even hang his magnificent head. He flinched in the brow as though Nick had thrown a punch rather than a metaphysical fist-tight wad of guilt but evidently he’d already felt so much of his own it barely fazed him. Infuriatingly, diplomatically, pure Sam, he said, “I know.” 

A little red pitch in the corner of Nick’s eye jolted sudden molten lightning up his spine. Something loosed itself, like a word, but from his hand, but also from somewhere next to him, or beside, or underneath, and it burned a hole in the carpet. After a moment’s shocked silence Sam said, “Leave it to you to learn that one.” 

“What?” 

Another… like a stone from a slingshot. But it was a nothing, a nothing shaped like something. It crashed through the glass protecting a portrait of some antique relative and shattered it to the floor. The sendings fled, dissolving through the doors and the walls. “Nick,” Sam said carefully. 

Something felt and smelled like caramel burning just inside the very front of the case of his mind. Thick, dark, eye-like bubbles in viscous liquid. “It’s not me!” he said, or maybe shouted, desperately, as a kind of last stab, because already he knew — 

“It is you.” 

Sam had both his hands out as though confronting a would-be-suicide with a loaded gun. 

“Try the other one,” he said. 

“What — ” 

Something flashed, shattered. When he dared to open his eyes again he saw Sam was folding a kind of quick fluorescent shield of bright gold fire back into his hand. His teacup rested at his feet in shards. The dark liquid spilled and spread like blood against the parquet floor and the infuser ball rolled under the couch. “That would have killed me,” Sam said. “Nice one.” 

“How do I make it — ” 

This one hit the floor and rebounded toward the ceiling where it severed the chandelier. Sam threw a mark like a cricket ball which caught it hovering in midair, crystal chattering, Charter flames — candles which never burned out — guttering and choking in the spelled vacuum. 

“Find where it is and block it off,” Sam said, as though this were very obvious. As though it were a fire which could be put out. As though it were a leaky roof which could be patched. As though it were something boiling over that could be taken off the heat. As though the brakes could be applied. As though there were failsafes, vents to let the steam out. As though there were anything but the same old mind as always with a new chamber opened up at the back full of fire and twisting vines. 

“With what?” 

“The mark for wall is _duru_.” Sam pulled it out of the charter into his hand and held it. Then he stretched it, like raw dough, from one hand to the other to hold it in front of himself against the next spell. It was no matter, because the next swept past him and blew all the books off the shelves and flattened them to the floor like dead moths under an electric light. “You have to at least try, Nick,” Sam said. He was shouting into something now like a howling wind which came from some heterophonic elsewhere behind and underneath. For the first time, the very first time, he sounded afraid. 

The wind was from an area of high pressure to low. In that other place there was no sound at all. 

His ears were ringing. This was sometimes a symptom of it coming on. He sat at the writing table again and waited. Hedge was probably hovering. He seemed to have some kind of psychic sense for it, Nick sometimes thought. The sheer blood-blind descended slowly over his field of vision like the curtain at the end of a performance in one of the monumental, gilded-gaslit Corvere orchestra halls and with it a roar of applause — pure tones bright and sheer as a clapper struck against a bell. Thunder struck close, and the ensemble emerged for a bow. He got to his feet and went outside. Like this the metallic air was almost fortifying. Lo and behold Hedge was at his quarter attending. He knelt to show the burn scars against the scalp and neck. The shard knew they were hundreds of years old. They had been acquired in the far southern desert by no more than the elements, because that had been when Hedge was just a man. 

“Get up,” the shard said. Hedge did. “How goes it.” 

“It goes, my lord.” 

The shard twisted the face. It had been eons if ever the shard had had a face. 

“The Dead have broken through the ash barrier,” Hedge corrected at the look. 

“The last is bone,” the shard said. Could feel its suffocating weight even then in that suffocating little body. 

“Yes, measures have been taken.” 

“Need I ask what measures.” 

“Measures that’ll work, master.” 

This was unsatisfactory. “Need I remind you of the stakes.” 

“Of course not, master.” 

The stakes were eternity in purgatory followed by another eternity in another purgatory which was this soft and delicate and hideous body which magic had never touched before. The shard felt refracted through the host in which it lived the age-old memory of eating, breathing, pissing, shitting, fainting, crying, laughing, the texture of mud, and the smell of things, the orgy of color — all of it of an embarrassment beyond humiliation to have ever suffered. 

“I must be whole.” 

“Of course, master.” 

There was almost no self left then. The division and the wards had undone much of the self and what had remained in the shard had been passed among high bidders at poker tables in the camps and trading posts and mailstops and bazaars at every squalid corner of this world for eons until it had come to the burned man. The self had been scraped away from the inside like the flesh inside a melon. All that remained was the certainty of itself. 

“I must be whole.” 

The shard receded into its host’s grist. Consciousness cycled like oil and water. There was a sub-second’s flash when they passed like ships in the night and saw one another’s light on the distant horizon. Nick beheld the pit and keeled into Hedge’s arms. 

_I must be whole_ , Nick thought. He recalled that only at the very end when the right magic touched him did he realize there was still an I. The marks had cauterized the great open wound which had been shedding him out of himself. He could see them now inside his mind wretched with golden fire. When he touched them they came away into his hands like a ripe apple, lucid as coins. The memory which was the world juddered at the corners as though workers on a movie set were rolling up some hellish backdrop. Then he levied them, like cricket balls, the way Sam had — one mark rolled up the memory, one threw it behind the door, one closed the door, and the penultimate hammered the last, which was a railroad spike, through the frame to keep it shut. 

The first thing he noticed when he opened his eyes was that all the glass in the room was broken. It was dawn. Piles of broken books on the floor and the chandelier still hovering, trembling, candles guttering — then Sam bowled him over. His clothes and skin were cool and he held Nick tightly against himself and rocked and as such Nick realized someone was crying but there was no one else in the room and Sam wasn’t crying, so it must have been himself. 

To wit Sam pulled back and smoothed Nick’s hair away from his face. His hands were shaking. “You did it,” he said. He tried to smile a little but his eyes were very red. “It’s over.” 

“Over,” Nick repeated, but it sounded like a question, or a sob. 

Sam lied very bravely. “It’s over,” he said again, “it is.” 

“No, it isn’t.” 

“Nick — ”

“I want it to be over. I want it all gone — I want it all out of me — all of it. Except that if it were — I don’t know what else is there. There’s nothing else there.” 

“Of course there’s — ”

“Sam, everything that I… was before, it’s like another planet to me now. So I have nothing — I am nothing, but this. But I can’t stand it. I’m terrified of it. And I think, you know, maybe we’re the same.” 

Liquid gathered in the corner of Sam’s eye. Perfunctorily, dreading it, Nick could tell, he asked, “Who’s we?” 

“Don’t make me say it, Sam — ” 

Sam didn’t. Instead he reached for the back of Nick’s neck and kissed his mouth. The kiss seared the hole in his heart and his mind shut still tighter for now. Death was behind him breathing like a hatch into an earthen basement. Eventually Sam sent a rune to bar the door and had Nick again on the rough wool rug, remarkably gently, stroking his hair and kissing his face and all this and that whilst wearing an expression of blindsided affection and empathy that at first was almost too embarrassing to look at until he really looked at it and then couldn't look away from it and couldn’t stop making these humiliating, humiliated sounds and touching Sam’s back and grabbing his ass and holding him inside and all the while feeling like he was going to cry because it solved nothing, and they both knew it did but were trying to pretend it would solve everything, which had long since been hashed out as the crucible of their every failure as friends and lovers; one thing to be said was at the last he couldn't think anymore, let the self go, felt all body for a precious, terrifying moment. Came back around to the feeling of Sam healing the carpet burn on his back with Charter marks the color and relative sensation of lemon drops against a sore throat. 

\--

“What would you have done if it wouldn’t stop.” 

Sam emptied warm water from his cupped hands over Nick’s head to rinse away soap suds. The bath was warm and the sulfurous smell of the subterranean springs that supplied the water hardly registered after so many months in this place. The glass and mirrors were fogged, lending the impression that a white cloud had set in isolating the entire tiny room from whatever was outside. 

“I don’t know,” Sam said, “I wasn’t thinking about it.” 

“You knew I could stop it.” 

“Yeah, I guess.” 

“Why?” 

“Because you’re very smart and capable when you don’t insist on being contrary.” 

He turned back toward Sam, who pressed a kiss at the corner of his mouth. Eventually he hooked his chin over Nick’s shoulder and tried to unfurrow his brow. His palm rested over the place at the center of Nick’s chest where just two weeks or so ago the last of the black bruises had faded. The leaky faucet, burnished bronze, dripped into the still water in a rough septuple meter. 

“Did you know this would happen again?” Nick asked him eventually. 

“Well I thought that — after it happened once, you know, probably it would happen again, being as Free Magic isn’t famously adherent to human will…” 

“I mean — ” 

Nick gestured to the space between them, which wasn't much if anything at all. 

“It doesn’t just — happen,” Sam reminded him, “we’re active players.” 

“Well did you know we would do it again?” 

“Not really. I thought, maybe. Hoped. Maybe. Did you?” 

“Hmm,” said Nick. 

“Did you?” 

“No.” 

“Why not?” 

“I thought you were past me.” 

“Past you?” 

“You were going to be the junior state death enforcer and I was going to get a degree in electrical engineering. I suppose I thought if we saw each other again there might be nothing to talk about.” 

“Doesn’t necessarily preclude fucking,” Sam said sensibly. His hand found the vein inside Nick’s thigh under the water. 

“Don’t be crude,” said Nick, but he held Sam’s hand there. He'd never had so much sex in one sitting and was thinking about pushing his luck. “You know it gets me off, riling you up.” 

“Does it?” 

“You couldn’t tell?” 

He turned into Sam’s kiss. Water sloshed to the tile floor. Like this the passages and transits of skin over skin bore a soft electric charge. Nick closed his eyes and set about the process of convincing himself that this was enough, that he was enough, Sam was enough, — warm enough, safe enough, sure enough, loved enough, healed enough, closed enough, close enough, far enough, alive enough, convinced enough… 

\--

In the morning, as he possibly should have predicted, there was a letter out on the table in the library. Nick woke up early, having slept without dreams, put his dressing gown on and downstairs in the kitchen put the kettle on for tea. Someone — Sam, the sendings — had straightened up the library by magical means and the only evidence of its near-destruction was that there were a few candles out on the great chandelier. The rug was also crooked, though this likely had another precedent. It was in the process of straightening it that he noticed the letter, which slipped to the floor gracefully, like a dead white bird or a paper airplane. 

He would’ve opened it even if it wasn't addressed to him: 

_Nicholas Sayre_  
_Abhorsen’s House_  
_River Ratterlin  
_ _The Old Kingdom_

Inside was a single sheet of fine white-beige parchment like a dusk sky. She — because of course it was her — had started writing in the middle of the paper, wide scrawling cursive shedding blown-out black ink splotches and shreds, because there was so little to say: 

_I wonder if you can meet me in a fortnight’s time in Grynhold. Don’t want to put much in writing._

_Hope you’re well. Heard you had a bit of a scare which reminds me do bring Sam. L_

She was infuriating. He felt a flash of love for her and then a flash of strangling fear. If she was asking for them both to come, she must have found something — answers, the truth, a way back, a way forward… She must have needed their help. 

How strange that he had so feared and loathed the thought that he might be consigned to this house forever — like how many other denizens of this island made of death-stuff chained to the living world — considering the other option seemed equally if not more terrifying. The river roared. It had sequestered him for three months now against every evil thing beyond he now understood was real. And he himself not far from one of them. 

He wondered if the shard — It — had ever been afraid, in all its time inside him and in all the millennia before. If It had been frightened to be Itself again. If It worried It would not recognize Itself after everything. If Its old power would not return to It. If vengeance was no tonic. If It would be thwarted once more at the last. If something about the world had changed irrevocably in the interim — conditions of gases, ozone, magic — such that it would no longer be worth commanding. 

Nick understood from the open door of his shared memory with the end of all things that if It had been afraid the fear was never more than the desire, the need-beyond-desire, to be whole again. To be real again. The single most profound imperative of all life, all death: to scrape a handhold through the wards, the membrane, to claw one’s way toward — fulfillment? Sex? Water? 

He chose the path he couldn’t see. He might’ve burned the letter, but he folded it and put it in his pocket. Then he set off upstairs to wake Sam.

\--

-

**Author's Note:**

> thank you so much for reading. thank you hapakitsune for the inspiration to delve back into this world and these characters. this is a mild butchering of your prompt... but i hope it's to your liking :) 
> 
> i must thank [this song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d4C5T3hvrk) which i listened to on repeat while writing all of nick's flashbacks to being possessed.


End file.
